INTERVIEW:She has made the transition from arthouse to Hollywood, from supporting player to leading star, and though she has an Oscar and a stream of high-profile roles, she still maintains she's not an actor. Tilda Swinton, it seems, is only warming up
THE LAST TIME I met Tilda Swinton for this magazine she scared nine colours of doo-doo out of me. Even before she'd opened her mouth, I was already aware of a slight quaking in the knees. Twelve feet tall, with loud red hair, the Scottish actor radiates the droit de seigneurappropriate to a representative of an ancient aristocratic dynasty. (Sure enough, her dad, Major-General Sir John Swinton, is lord lieutenant of Berwickshire.)
Granted an audience to discuss her performance as the White Witch (what else?) in the first Narniafilm, I dared to ask if her children were looking forward to the film.
"What? Why?" she said in the voice you would expect her to use if I'd asked whether the kids might be white supremacists. "No, no, no. They are too busy climbing trees to be interested in that."
Here she comes again. Looking fabulous in a black dress with an arrangement of mirror fragments across its bodice, she swans into the room and coils her mighty frame into a nervous armchair. She must know that she scares people. Mustn't she? "Recently I have been asked to be scary in a number of films and I have complied. I was asked to be scary for Narnia. I was asked to be scary by the Coens and I complied," she says.
True enough. She was unnervingly dictatorial in the Coen brothers' Burn After Readingand properly ruthless in that Narnia picture.
"But are you suggesting that people who have met me find me scary?" she says, erm, scarily. "Is that what you mean?" I lie and say that I, of course, mean nothing of the sort.
"In those films it was my brief to be scary and if I had not been scary then I would not have fulfilled that brief."
As it happens, Tilda Swinton is in charming form today.
She will, from time to time, dissect your question with forensic mischievousness, but she is happy to tell the odd joke and seems prepared to suffer fools with more than usual gladness.
"I just had a London journalist ask me what my favourite item of clothing was and when I said 'my kilt' she looked confused and . . ." Tilda adopts the tone Lady Bracknell uses when discussing handbags " . . . asked me to spell 'kilt'. I mean, really. The English!" She's laughing as she says this.
Swinton has been very busy lately, but the travel and bustle seem to suit her. In the three years since we last met, she has appeared in films by Jim Jarmusch, Béla Tarr and the Coen Brothers. She has become a patron of the Edinburgh Film Festival and has set up her own festival - the Ballerina Ballroom Cinema Of Dreams - near her home in the Scottish highlands. Last February she won an Oscar for her performance in Michael Claytonand, in the next two months, another two Swinton films will hit cinemas. The first, Erick Zonca's Julia, is a harrowing naturalistic piece; the second, David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, is a gorgeous epic that has Oscar written all over it.
Juliafinds Swinton playing an alcoholic who gets dragged into a scheme to kidnap the grandson of a billionaire. Over a daunting 138 minutes, the title character confronts her inadequacies as she drives the boy across the southern US and into Mexico. Many critics have seen the picture as an homage to the work of John Cassavetes and to that director's Gloriain particular.
"Yes. There were rumours that it was a remake of Gloriaand that's not true," she says. "Though Erick and I admire Cassavetes, it might be better to look at him as just the godfather of the project." Like that American film-maker, Zonca, director of the admired Dreamlife of Angels, appears prepared to allow his actors to improvise. The film has a loose, funky feel that suggests a degree of collaboration went on.
"I think of it as being like a David Attenborough documentary following a particular kind of creature. If he were making a film about a dung beetle he might just call it Dung Beetle. This is a study of Julia, so we call it Julia."
Swinton, now a perfectly preserved 48 years old, has been about the cultural landscape for quite some time. She first came above ground in the mid-1980s when, following graduation from Cambridge, she fell in with the legendary experimental film-maker Derek Jarman. Roles in Jarman's War Requiemand Sally Potter's Orlandofollowed, but it was not until the turn of the last decade that she began to register with a mainstream audience.
Expecting to have my nose bitten off, I dare to ask whether the apparent move towards American films was the result of a conscious decision on her part.
"Well, it's the result of several things," she says pleasantly. "When Derek Jarman died in 1994, I realised I had to find other fellow travellers. I had to be open to, for example, film-makers on the west coast of America. The second dull fact is that my children were quite young and you can't spend three months away making a film like Julia. The recent performances in the films you mentioned have been like surgical strikes. If you are having a party with the Coens or with Michael Clayton, you can be in and out quite quickly."
Katherine Matilda Swinton was born into a very different world to the one she now inhabits. Raised in a big draughty house, she attended the same school as Princess Diana - indeed, she was in the same class - before heading off to New Hall, Cambridge. Her initial ambition was to become a writer, but, by her own admission, she became distracted at college and never found time to pound the typewriter. Her subsequent career seems to have been a happy accident. Jarman recognised her unique charisma and she went on to become the late director's muse. Even now, Swinton, perverse as ever, bristles when she hears herself described as an actor.
"The thing you need to know about me is that I never set out to be a performer," she says. "I am a political science graduate who should have gone to art school or become a writer. I ended up in films because I am a film fan. Derek was interested in what I could do as a presence rather than an actor."
But she is an actor. I've seen her speaking lines in movies. "Again you are misunderstanding something," she says in her Mrs Thatcher voice. "You keep saying I am an actor. I am not an actor. People in your position ask me questions all the time - questions for actors - that I don't know the answer to. The fact that they ask them means they are used to having them answered. That's one way I know I'm not an actor." It is true that, in her early films, she was used more as a striking avant-garde ornament than as a speaker of dialogue. But she does act now. She's acting in Julia. She's acting in Benjamin Button. I've seen her.
"I might do. Yes, maybe I am. But don't make assumptions about where my point of connection is with the material. I spent the first 20 years of my life feeling that writing was my vocation. This all feels like a red herring. This is all a diversion. I have started to write again, but I am not sure my life's work has really started yet."
Since she won that Oscar in February, it has become even harder for Swinton to pretend that she's not a proper actor. Mind you, she did a good job of putting some distance between herself and the botoxed herd at the ceremony. Dressed in a baggy, asymmetric dress, her face carrying only the subtlest smear of make-up, Swinton looked every inch the defiant maverick.
You will not be surprised to hear that she claimed never to have seen the Oscar ceremony before. Yet she does admit that she did have some sense of how events were supposed to unfold.
"At first, I was a bit disappointed by the scale," she laughs. "It seemed a bit more intimate than I had expected. Then I realised I had been to the Oscars courtesy of Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard. It was so much more scary and gladiatorial in that film. When we were there we were next to a lot of our friends: the Coens, Julian Schnabel. So it felt quite like a party."
Did the win change things for her?
"Well, now I am producing films, I am aware that it has become a bit easier to talk to financiers. It's like you have this special rosette you're allowed to wear."
Her success at the Oscars drew attention to a home life that some commentators pretend to regard as unimaginably eccentric. Swinton has been living with John Byrne, the popular writer and painter, for many years. They have twins, Xavier and Honor, and, by all accounts, remain on good terms, despite no longer being romantically linked. Since 2004, Tilda has been seeing Sandro Kopp, a painter, Byrne's junior by nearly 40 years, and Byrne, too, has recently found a new love. One paper recently described the arrangement as a " ménage a quatre", but it seems a good deal less sordid than that implies.
"John Byrne is certainly still the father of the children," she says matter-of-factly. "He has not quit from that job. And we are still the greatest of chums. It really is not as difficult as people seem to believe. I am sad for people who don't find it easy to be chums with those they used to be close to and even had children with. But we are lucky that way. We are blessed."
At the relatively advanced age of 48, Tilda Swinton has, by accident rather than design, found herself reinvented as a proper movie star. She quite correctly notes that credit for this unlikely transformation is due to a new class of Hollywood director who is prepared to employ less conventional actors in mainstream films. Andrew Adamson hired her for Narnia. Tony Gilroy felt she was right for Michael Clayton. For all her prickliness about being dragooned into the acting fraternity, she has just the right sort of daunting charisma for the movies. When she is on screen, every other actor seems slightly diminished.
That presence will be on display early next month in Fincher's lavish The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The picture follows Brad Pitt's title character as he lives his life backwards. Beginning the film wrinkled and decrepit, he works his way through middle-age, youth, childhood and eventually becomes a doomed infant. Along the way, he ends up in Murmansk and has a romance with Swinton's haughty adulteress.
"It's a big old magical fable based on an F Scott Fitzgerald story," she explains. "We are in for a degree of technical wizardry that may make it The Jazz Singer of digital cinema. It's that groundbreaking. It may soon be possible to have a 24-year-old Marlon Brando if we want one. This film offers us a 19-year-old Brad Pitt and that's pretty nice."
Swinton regards the release of Benjamin Button as the closing act in the current chapter of her career. Over the next year, she intends to work more often on films - such as Julia, which she co-produced - that she had a hand in generating. Hard work seems to suit her. Jollier, funnier and less snappy than she once seemed, she appears to be enviably comfortable in her alabaster skin. Might I dare to ask this more-cuddly Tilda if her children did ever get to see Narnia?
"They did eventually get to see it," she says. "I was asked to talk at their school about Narnia. They sat through the talk diffidently and then afterwards said they might like to see the film. They kind of liked it. But they thought the wrong side won. They had no interest in those soppy kids."
Well, they sound a tad prickly and unconventional. Wherever can they have got that from?
• Juliais on limited release from December 5th. The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttonis on general release from February 6th.